Loyalty program tips

Good morning from Skift. It’s Thursday, May 11. Here’s what you need to know about the business of travel today.

The complexity of point loyalty programs has pushed several travel companies to rethink their strategy, and the most recent to flip the script is Marriott Bonvoy. 

An airline does not have 86 million passengers by chance — these customers have to choose you, according to Pieter Elbers, CEO of Indian low-cost carrier Indigo.

Norwegian Air and Nordic hotels group Strawberry said on Tuesday they plan to form a joint venture company which will provide benefits to the members of the groups’ respective loyalty programmes.

Expedia said it plans to add several new features, such as hotel images and traveler reviews, to its ChatGPT-powered trip-planning features. The generative AI-based trip planner will be available in its Android app in August and these additional features would be available in both apps in the next few months.

Marriott International has signed a licensing deal with MGM Resorts to let Marriott Bonvoy loyalty members earn points when staying at 17 MGM resorts, starting in October. Bookings at 40,000 of MGM’s rooms mainly in Las Vegas will be available through Marriott’s site and app by year-end.

Hyatt Hotels Corporation is on the fast track to growing its brand, its property portfolio and its loyalty partnerships. While not the biggest hospitality company, it is laser-focused on being the best by expanding its geography and listening to customers. Even during the tough pandemic era, Hyatt found opportunity to grow in key markets and evolve with the ever-changing travel landscape. All of this helped position Hyatt for the post-Covid travel boom, benefiting both consumers and investors.

Although Uber has relationships with several airline and hotel loyalty programs, it has so far stopped short of launching its own program. That changes this week, with the announcement of a simple buy-nine-get-one-free offer in conjunction with Capital One.

With Alaska Airline’s acquisition of Virgin America, it was just a matter of time before Virgin’s loyalty program, Elevate, was terminated and its members folded into Alaska’s Mileage Plan program. In the meantime, the programs were somewhat integrated, allowing reciprocal mileage earning. And beginning on January 9, 2017, Elevate members will be able to convert their points at a 1:1.3 ratio to miles in Mileage Plan, and have their Virgin status matched in Alaska’s program.

American’s AAdvantage program isn’t the only loyalty scheme converting to spend-based points accrual later this year. Starbucks, the world’s largest purveyor of coffee-based beverages, has announced plans to make a similar change to its Rewards program, effective some time in April.

On March 1, Hyatt’s Gold Passport program will become World of Hyatt. Whether the change amounts to the introduction of a wholly new program or just a revamp of the existing program is more a matter of semantics than of substance. However how choose to look at it, though, the program is changing. And, according to many Hyatt loyalists, the change is not for the better.

For the past seven years, Club Carlson has been the loyalty program for Carlson Hotels. OK, except, confusingly, there aren’t any Carlson hotels, except for Country Inn & Suites by Carlson, which are widely known simply as Country Inn & Suites.

Airbnb differs in many ways from traditional hotel chains. Among the differences: Whereas every major hotel group has a robust loyalty program, Airbnb has none. But that may be set to change.

When Marriott acquired Starwood in 2016, there was much speculation on how the merger would affect two very different loyalty programs. Since then, the Marriott and Starwood programs have operated independently, but as of yesterday, Marriott has announced that the programs, plus the Ritz-Carlton Rewards program, will officially merge into one mega-program beginning in August 2018.